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Can we talk…to dolphins? Jupiter’s Wild Dolphin Project profiled in National Geographic

For 30 years, Dr. Denise Hertzing of Jupiter's Wild Dolphin Project, has studied the same group of Atlantic spotted dolphins. (Photo/Wild Dolphin Project)

For 30 years, Dr. Denise Herzing of Jupiter’s Wild Dolphin Project, has studied the same group of Atlantic spotted dolphins. (Photo/Wild Dolphin Project)

Can we learn to “speak” dolphin? Can dolphins learn to “speak” to us?

The world’s longest underwater dolphin research project, based in Jupiter, is attempting to answer that question.

The work of the Wild Dolphin Project’s research director, Dr. Denise Herzing is among those profiled in May’s issue ofNational Geographic magazine in a story called, “It’s Time for a Conversation: Breaking the communication barrier between dolphins and humans.”

The Wild Dolphin Project is profiled in May’s National Geographic magazine.

For 30 years, Herzing, who lives in Juno Beach and is known as “the Jane Goodall of the sea,” has spent summers in the clear, shallow waters of The Bahamas, observing a particular pod of Atlantic spotted dolphins.

Four years ago, she began collaborating with a Google Glass developer from the Georgia Institute of Technology, who built Herzing an underwater device called the Cetacean Hearing and Telemetry (CHAT.) The machine is designed to translate some of dolphins’ vocabulary of whistles, clicks and the “burst pulses” they use to drive away sharks and call their young.

From her research vessel “Stenella” (named for spotted dolphins’ genus,) Herzing is trying to get a group of young female dolphins to associate three whistles emitted by the CHAT box with three toys: a scarf, a rope and sargassum, the stringy seaweed that dolphins commonly play with in the wild. (Click here to hear examples of the three kinds of dolphin communication.)

The idea is to build an artificial language or interface that will one day allow her and the dolphins to “talk.”

In another project, the WDP is working with the University of California at San Diego to index 26 years of recorded underwater dolphin “talk,” to try to discern patterns in the ways the mammals communicate with each other.

Dolphins, with their close-knit social groups and large mammalian brains, are incredibly “talkative.” Scientists like Herzing have long wondered what all that garrulous audible and sometimes inaudible (at least, to humans) communication means.

Herzing may have taken a step toward understanding it.

You can read about the Herzing and Jupiter’s Wild Dolphin Project in National Geographichere.